Despite a rich tradition of horror writers and film, until recently we never really did Hallowe’en in this country. In the 80s and 90s you’d be hard pressed to find a Horror film showing on TV for the night itself (though for some reason we have long upheld a tradition of Ghost Stories at Christmas) and Trick Or Treaters were highly unlikely to darken your door, so we certainly never got carried away to the extent that there was a season-long British equivalent to your Knott’s Berry bollocks, in fact practically everything we know about the festivities of Hallowe’en in this country are informed by your films and TV shows. But we had distinct enough of a handle on the overarching concept to be nonplussed when we watched E.T., or a Spider-Man cartoon where people were flouncing round on the big night dressed as belly dancers and cowboys in search of sweeties.

I honestly don’t even know how to start to talk about this album…or half an album, since I haven’t been able to bring myself to give Big Boi’s disc a fair shake; because I know that whatever it’s like, it can’t possibly occupy the same blinged-out Madonna Inn of amour that André Benjamin dreamed into being here. Having said that, I recently discovered that one of Big Boi’s favourite artists is Kate Bush, so I should really get round to that.

Nature is reclaiming my elderly neighbour’s house. Really rubbing his nose in it. Recently I’ve been walking around all my former haunts, and this album has been accompanying me. Of course, there’s nothing like the olfactory and auditory to fast-track you to your memory banks, but this is nostalgia illegitimately invoked since this is an album as new to me as the year. Ordinarily I try to unearth an album to share with you that I’ve lived with for a long time, but strangely, this is an album that takes me to the era it was made without me having heard it before.

He was a young and eager GP, visibly perplexed by my ‘presentation’ but stubbornly reluctant to tessellate my gastroenterological symptoms toward the neighbourhood of research I’d done on the internet to save him time. I’d been suffering from a white hot smoulder below my navel that would occur two hours after eating and knock me onto my back for extended stretches, leaving me feeling pinned to the spot like a display case insect.

I gather y’all had a total eclipse of the sun this the past week? We rarely have anything as interesting or extreme in this perpetual gloaming we Brits call a climate. Last time we did was August 1999, and the next isn’t due until September 2090, which I can confidently RSVP in the negatory. I at least experienced the last we had. I was losing my shit job-virginity in a Cash & Carry. Customer footfall into the warehouse disappeared the closer it drew, and we stepped into an Omega Man-outside, pedestrian and vehicular traffic along the busy corridor into the city eerily absent. The celestial sequence began and Co-workers drew out little rectangles of amber perspex to view it through and the weekday world began to take on an incongruous gloom on this hot and clear August morning. I looked at the random assortment of specimens I was contractually obliged to spend 37.5 hours of my waking week-with all craning their heads sunward and decided for some reason I might be better off looking behind me…

That kid who sat at the back of the class, seemingly almost monochromatic except for his Egon Schiele pink-tinged skin? You never heard of him again. You assume he was institutionalised after leaving school for the strange things he was rumoured to be doing to the neighbourhood pets in his bedroom. Or perhaps he even managed to drift along under the radar for a while until he finally did that hushed-up ‘something’ that got him put away for the rest of his natural days. It thrills my soul to think, that for someone in the world, that kid has wandered back into their consciousness as a bona fide dyed-in-the-wool purveyor of American song. The signs were already apparent on the aptly named ‘Supper’, the penultimate, most accomplished album of Smog’s career to that point. The songs were sumptuously crafted, achingly poignant or else chugged-along rockingly, teeming with an abundance of astute observation delivered in his trademark laconic style. After declaring his love for a watercourse, the Smog lifted, and along with it, so did his mood…albeit temporarily, making it easy to forget that this monochromatic, Egon Schiele-skinned kid used to do strange things to his tape recorder in his bedroom.